Arrivederci Roma (film)

Infobox Film
name = Seven Hills of Rome


image_size =
caption =
director = Roy Rowland
producer = Lester Welch
writer = Art Cohn and Giorgio Prosperi
narrator =
starring = Mario Lanza
Marisa Allasio
Renato Rascel
music =
cinematography =
editing =
distributor = Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
released = 1958
runtime = 107 min.
country = Italy and USA
language = English
budget =
preceded_by = "Serenade (film)"
followed_by = "For the First Time"
website =
amg_id =
imdb_id = 0050140

"Seven Hills of Rome" was tenor Mario Lanza's penultimate film. Shot in 1957 on location in Rome and at the Titanus studios in the Italian capital, the movie was released by MGM in January 1958.

The Technirama film tells the story of Marc Revere, an American TV singer of Italian heritage who travels to Italy in search of his jet-setting fiancée, Carol Ralston, played by Peggie Castle. Revere moves in with his comical and good hearted cousin Pepe Bonelli (Renato Rascel), a struggling artist who also befriends a beautiful young girl, Raffaella Marini (Marisa Allasio), whom Revere had met on a train. Like Lanza, this was Allasio's next-to-last film (the 17th of her career), as she would marry Count Pierfrancesco Calvi di Bergolo, grandson of H.R.M. Vittorio Emanuele III, King of Italy, in November 1958 and retire from the cinema.

Among the selections that Lanza sings in this "vocal tour de force" ("Variety") is "Arrivederci Roma", performed in the Piazza Navona with a young street urchin. In typical Lanza fashion, the star had encountered the youngster while in Rome and insisted on her appearing in the film.

Lanza also performs a sequence of imitations of famous singers of the era — Perry Como, Frankie Laine, Dean Martin, and Louis Armstrong — committing to film what was one of his favorite party performances.

Opera selections include "Questa o Quella" from "Rigoletto".

The film was directed by Roy Rowland and was the first of only four films produced by Lester Welch. [imdb name|id=0919600|name=Lester Welch] The screenplay was the last written by Art Cohn, who died two months after the film's release in the same airplane crash that killed famed producer Mike Todd, whose biography Cohn was writing at the time. Cohn partnered with Giorgio Prosperi [imdb name|id=0698782|name=Giorgio Prosperi] on the script for the Lanza film, which was based on a story by Giuseppe Amato.

"Seven Hills of Rome" won a Laurel Award (1959) from "Motion Picture Exhibitor" magazine. [ [http://www.imdb.com/Sections/Awards/Laurel_Awards/1959 1959 Laurel Awards] ]

Its Italian title was "Arrivederci, Roma", which was to be the American title of a film Lanza was scheduled to make in 1960, until he died in Rome in October 1959.

ources

*Cesari, Armando. "Mario Lanza: An American Tragedy" (Fort Worth: Baskerville 2004).
*Notes accompanying the 1990 video release of the film.

References

External links

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* [http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/movie.html?v_id=109554 "New York Times" review]